Engineering

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Text description provided by the architects. The area, a place where they are building motorways in order to reduce vehicular traffic from the Atlantic coast of Gaia, is actually zoned as an agricultural reserve. This is its status in the development plan, this is how it is; it is set in law and will remain so until the law is altered. Agricultural activity is non-existent, except for the small vegetable plots.

The first step taken was to set apart the maximum allowable 300m2 plot for a building.

Two hundred square meters for the residence and one hundred square meters for possible out- buildings, which I would consider appropriate for a farmer to build a home on agricultural land, without compromising our survival as a traditionally agricultural country.

This was a complex task that required the involvement of various institutions and meetings with numerous participants. An arduous task but not necessarily so. For some people, 200 + 100 equals 300; this forced us to make some corrections to what had seemed mathematically obvious, because it wasn’t, at least to some people.

As usual, in this country, it was only a question of time, of time wasted. The arithmetic question was resolved and the chance to build secured.

The client was looking for a house with a brief that actually fitted the allowable building areas, which was helpful; two hundred square meters for the house, plus a garage and service areas that make up the remaining one hundred square meters.

The Madalena House and the elements of the brief were arranged over three volumes.

The central volume where the social areas are laid out, the volume to the west with the three bedrooms and two bathrooms and the volume, or annexe, to the east, characterized by the covered garage area and the volume of the store and technical areas.

The brief was to design a single storey house and with the exception of the study, which is located over the kitchen, all the elements of the brief are accommodated on the ground floor.

A strange method of building, if compared with what is commonly done; something which led to various and curious speculations during the construction period.

With the floor slab cast and the walls erected and insulated, still without a roof or other floors while it waited for the carpenters to start on site, it looked more like a sculpture or installation of some kind. The speculation was that it was to be a new chapel or some other ill-defined thing which prolific imaginations are capable of coming up with.

No, it was just a house that, with its rough concrete walls, turns its back on the urbanity of the street to the north and opens up to the enjoyment of the garden, the sun, the light and the privacy that the agricultural land still offers.

Inside, the concrete walls give over to white plasterboard and pine from Riga which is used structurally in the ceilings, and again in the window frames, which also act structurally.